Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Jack Layton, Bloc blocker

Trust no oneToday’s punditry includes fake photos, fake federalists and even (possibly) a fake candidate.

By far the most interesting item of the day has Sun Media CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau telling the tale of a photograph that was forwarded to his news organization by Patrick Muttart, Stephen Harper’s former deputy chief of staff and, until very recently, a Conservative war room staffer. This photo purported to show Michael Ignatieff brandishing a machine gun in front of a helicopter in Kuwait in 2002, which would have gone nicely with a Sun Media story about Mr. Ignatieff purportedly playing a key role in planning the invasion of Iraq. The photo was not of Mr. Ignatieff, as it turned out, but of an American soldier. The fact that Sun Media confirmed this and didn’t run the photo is evidence of what a great news organization they’re running, says Péladeau, who believes Mr. Muttart’s motives were clear: To impugn Mr. Ignatieff, and to “damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News.” Why would Mr. Muttart try to damage the credibility of a conservative-friendly news organization? Well, that’s a bloody good question.

And now we move on to the NDP surge. “It bears noting that there are a few shades of [Brian] Mulroney’s approach in what [Jack Layton’s] doing to win over Quebec,” Adam Radwanski writes, somewhat understatedly we think, in The Globe and Mail. We’d go as far as to say Mr. Layton is basically trying to win over Bloc Québécois voters by offering the Bloc minus sovereignty. Mind you, what you might call de facto sovereignty has been official NDP policy for a while, as Graeme Hamilton notes in an excellent piece in the National Post. If the plan pays off, Radwanski notes that the NDP might well end up with “a significant soft nationalist contingent within its own caucus,” which could in turn influence the party’s negotiations with another minority government, which could in turn exacerbate an all-party “bidding war” for Quebec’s affections. Which, if memory serves, is pretty much what federalists hoped a Bloc beat-down would prevent.

The Toronto Star‘s Thomas Walkom goes looking for Nicole Yovanoff, Mr. Layton’s candidate in Don Valley West … and cannot find her. She seems to have no phone number, certainly has no campaign office, will not return e-mails, and did not attend an all-candidates’ meeting. All we know about her, hilariously, is that she did not star in a film called Valley Party Girls, in which “a group of frat boys and beach girls (‘They’re hot, cute and on the loose’) … stymie the evil plans of a polluting industrialist.” Surely she’s not just running to have something to put on a resumé. That would be appalling!

The Post‘s Tasha Kheiriddin suggests the Liberals might have been dead right to frame this election as one about ethics and government accountability — and dead wrong to think they were the party to which Canadians worried about such matters would turn. Advantage: NDP. Let they who are without experience in government reap the rewards of not having sinned.

“After swearing that anything less [than a Conservative majority] would cause earth to shudder and sky to weep, it would be personally calamitous [for Stephen Harper] if a Conservative minority government functioned smoothly,” the Ottawa Citizen‘s Dan Gardnerwrites. “Harper said there would be instability, damn it. And he will make sure of it.” Gardner thinks the real path to less rancour and stupidity on Parliament Hill, and to less fear of coalition governments — which are, as he says, the norm around the world — is for the Conservatives to get themselves a new leader. We’re not sure about that. There are a lot of people in that party with the same chip on their shoulder. We wouldn’t put money on, say, Jason Kenney ushering in a new era of smiles and sunshine.

The Star‘s editorialistsare shocked — shocked, they tell you! — that Mr. Harper would stoop so low as to defend the Canadian asbestos industry on the campaign trail yesterday, even though he’s defended it lots of times before.

And the Post‘s Kevin Libin explains what it takes for a foreign political organization like Avaaz — of “Stop Fox News North” fame — to set up shop in Canada during elections, run a bunch of ads, and then disappear back to the United States. Answer: Not much. Libin implies we might be hearing a lot more about this if the organization in question was, say, the National Rifle Association, and we tend to agree.